It’s strange to think about how we’re in the middle of a moment in time, we rarely think about how important that moment might be. As we go about our daily lives, it’s hard to remove ourselves, take a step back, and know that we’ll look back on that time with great fondness.
Tim and I didn’t officially live together until we’d been married for over four months. We found an apartment before we got married, of course, but while he stayed in California to put our place together, I returned to Virginia to finish my last semester of college. It was strange, unusual … but as a couple, we knew we were doing the right thing.
Oh, how we strove to make our first apartment perfect! It was a beautiful complex, and the apartment was tiny. Teeny tiny. But it seemed palatial to us because it was ours. It only took two steps to walk across our kitchen into the laundry closet. In fact, looking back, I’m fairly certain the bathroom was larger than the kitchen. The living and eating area were one and the same. Our bedroom was barely big enough for the hand-me-down full size mattress we had on the floor (it was a really big deal when that mattress found its way into an Ikea bed frame). Our small, antique (code for shabby, not chic) dresser had to go in the closet, because the bedroom wasn’t big enough.
For the year that we lived in that apartment, though, we loved it. We’d lounge by the pool, we’d go on midnight walks around the neighborhood across the street — imagining ourselves inside a house “just like that one”, we’d build a fort in the front room, order pizza, and watch full TV series, hardly taking a break. I think back to those mornings sitting on the tiny slab of concrete we called a “balcony”, storing pots and pans under our bed because there wasn’t enough room in the kitchen cabinets, adopting Teddy, our darling English Cocker Spaniel … and I remember it as simple and warm and wonderful. I also remember yearning for more, though. I wanted a house. I wanted to host dinner parties and cookouts, and to have a yard of our own. I wanted what was next.
Of course, life does go on, and we’re experiencing the ‘nexts’ we so wistfully dreamed of. As I sit here at my computer, with my husband downstairs, our little girl asleep in her room, wondering about what’s next for us as we prepare to welcome another child into our family this spring, I think about that time — when we’d sit and talk for hours about our hopes and dreams for our life together. Looking back, that time seems so vivid to me, but when I was there, it kind of seemed like a fog. I have a tendency to want to get things done. Big things, small things, like there’s a finish line other than the one we’ll all have to cross someday.
So this is my reminder, to myself, to you, to sit back and enjoy the ride. Where you are. Your tiny room, or your paper plates. The now may just be the beginning of something beautiful.